Handsomely produced thriller that was well paced and finely acted. Great location photography, atmosphere and action sequence camera work as the protagonists hurry hour-to-hour through the crowded streets of Rome chasing a gruesome killer.

The over all effect - kinda dull.

The Dan Brown books, both this one and the viirtual re-write The Da Vinci Code were great beach reading. Interesting in their fusion of Christian/European/art history and political potboiler. But beneath it was a whodunnit that was no better than you would find on an Agatha Christie Fan Fiction web site (if there is such a thing).

Unfortunately in order to make for a good movie trailer (which seems to be the objective of a lot of movies these days) they focused on the thriller aspects and tossed the history lesson stuff aside. I assume that the reasoning was that it would put more asses in the seats and sell more popcorn. The end result is that the movie stands on the absolutely preposterous plot which really hurts the overall product. I think the box office has bourn that theory out.

This is a really bad film. It's quite run-of-the-mill executed, but with that budget, those actors and the Hollywood-esque resources they had, I'm just appalled that these people couldn't come up with anything better. Talk about ruining the collective consciousness as related to film. Now, I wasn't expecting greatness when I saw this, just something that was above par when compared with "The Da Vinci Code", which I think sucked but had something in the albino monk that tried to kill kill kill incessantly. So, if somebody would please graciously hack that film into something with just the albino, I'd be satisfied; the film would no doubt be much more exciting than seeing the main character find evidence and clues in everything he finds; oh yeah, so what about this film? The same. More of the same, only more trite; he shows the token female lead how clever he is, evades the enemy from time to time and makes all of Matt Damon in "Good Will Hunting" look stupid. My girlfriend fell asleep while we watched this; she's the lucky one out of us. Don't see this.

NOTE: Spoilers below. It's supposed to be a mystery, so if you want to watch it without any knowledge of the plot, just skip this.

SYNOPSIS: The Pope is dead, and it's time to elect a new official. But it gets complicated: The Vatican calls upon symbologist Robert Langdon to help them interpret clues to the locations of four kidnapped Cardinals. Meanwhile, Dr. Vittoria Vetra is helping to find a little canister of dark matter that was swiped from CERN that's located somewhere in Vatican City, threatening to eradicate everything and everyone in the city. The kidnapped Cardinals and canister all appear to be the work of the Illuminati bent on some ancient revenge. Sounds far fetched? Well, it's a Dan Brown novel. There you go.

PROS: I don't say this often, but I think the movie actually pruned out the worst parts of the book. Don't believe me? There's: A) the "love" story between Langdon and Vetra was cut. Definitely a good call. B) movie didn't go into the assassin's (take or leave the "h" in front of it) creepy lust issues. C) movie took out all daddy issues on the parts of two of the characters. D) movie removed several characters that didn't add too much to the story; I'm very glad they took out the two meddling reporter characters. Overall, more streamlined.

CONS: Well, as mentioned already, it's a bit far fetched. Why the hell do they call in some guy who's a symbologist and not an agency equivalent to the FBI? Yeah, the entire city is going to get blown to either heaven or hell, and I'm going to call on . . . a guy who interprets symbols. Great. The pruning of the book (mentioned above) also might have cut out some explanations: How did the assassin get into CERN to get the canister? How did Vetra know that the canister was in Vatican City to begin with? The storyline itself was on the formulaic side. Why does the countdown always have to end at midnight?

OVERALL: I know there will be many that will disagree with me on this one, but it's an improvement over the book (and I cite my proofs above). Still, swallowing the storyline might take more than a leap of faith.